Month: October 2014

Abstract This article looks at how a different world, a mythical version of America, is created on Bob Dylan’s 1975 album The Basement Tapes by reflecting on Rolling Stone-critic Greil Marcus’ ideas on ‘The Old-Weird America’. Using the Romantic idea of mythology and the Transcendentalist poetics of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson as a… Continue reading Hans Verhees | A Different Country. ‘The Old, Weird America’ on Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (Masterclass)

Abstract In more and more contemporary science-fiction films and novels the difficulty experienced in attempting to distinguish human from machine has become the main problem facing humanity, endangering its survival, as the machines turn against their architects. In his article, Androids and Eroticism, De Kam attempts such a differentiation between android and human in the… Continue reading David de Kam | Eroticism and Androids. On the Dynamic of Eroticism in Relation to Androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner (Masterclass)

Abstract While queer space was once primarily understood as a separate subcultural enclave, the increasing acceptance of lesbians and gays in western culture requires a recognition that such spaces are now sites for the deployment of multiple sexual identities, both gay and straight. Using the Queer Studies classroom as a model, this essay argues that… Continue reading Dennis Allen | A Place for Us: Queer Space and the Lesbian and Gay Studies Classroom

Abstract On July 19, 2000 a chance encounter changed one writer’s life and reshaped her perspectives on self, on the other, and on gendered identity within the lgbt world which must exist within the constructs of a society that shuns it. Part memoirs, part sociopolitical and cultural history, this article contains excerpts from a larger… Continue reading Lowrie Fawley | Everything I know about a Girl, I learned from a Drag Queen

Abstract By playing in the middle, the British sketch comedy program, Little Britain (2003-2006), establishes a very gay form of comedy, not because either one of its creators or half of its subject matter is gay, its skits often involve transvestism, or it normativizes (or queers) most subject positions. Instead, Little Britain’s comic gayness exists… Continue reading Judith Roof | “Aaa, Aaa, Aaa” Repetition/Compulsion, and Queer Comedy in Little Britain

Abstract ‘Queer’ continues to carry the brunt of scholarly and political claims about the sexual not despite but because of its different usages. The overburdened term does not so much supply an answer but productively traces a problem: the precarious relationships between erotic life, identity, and power. This introductory article critically considers various contemporary conceptualizations… Continue reading Murat Aydemir | In Queer Street